Day 5

It’s amazing how much you can experience in a day. It started with a visit to Microsoft. The most amazing experience there was the Future Home designed by techies at MS. It was futuristic – but not so futuristic. It was very easy to believe that such homes would be a reality in the next 5 – 10 years. It used simple technology of RFID (in everything that there is at home) and light bulbs with smart chips (not at all an expensive option in near future). Just few examples of the usage – which we actually saw in the future home. You take out milk from the refrigerator and place it close to the mixer. Some recipes involving milk which will be used in a mixer will be displayed on the kitchen surface from an overhead intelligent bulb. If you chose a recipe which, say involves choco chips and the refrigerator doesn’t have it, the Home will announce that you are out of choco chips and cannot make that particular dish. Further, what you have on your computer screen can be seen on the TV or the walls of the room. When we wanted to see where the planet Jupiter was w.r.t the sun, the whole room got converted to a planetarium showing Jupiter’s position. There is no need to paint the walls. You can have it re-designed as and when you like by just by announcing to the home that you need some kind of a setting. It will change the color on the wall, change the photographs on the electronic photo frames – basically you won’t feel it is the same room. It’s tough to describe the whole 1 hour experience in which we actually were in the future. Microsoft Office: A slight Deja vu of InfosysAfter this awesome experience, Binay, Anu and I went to the space needle. The 360 degree view of Seattle from the top of the 600 foot tower is breath taking. More than that it is fascinating to see how the Americans market it. Cameras were installed on the top and you could see the whole city standing at one place and moving the camera with a joystick. Interactive touch screens were installed to give information about the part of the city that you are viewing at a particular point. We got out of the air conditioned enclosure only for a few seconds and were blown away by the super chilly winds at that height. The dinner was Pan Asian today and time to again learn something – using chopsticks. I learnt it quite quickly and went on eating for sometime using the sticks but it was tiring after some time. Such a fascinating day full of experiences is of course tiring and it was tough to think of anything else apart from the bed on reaching home. Observation Deck of Space Needle